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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Building Web Apps? Check out our Field Guide

By Pete LePage, Developer Advocate

Yesterday, the Chrome Developer Relations team launched several new resources, including the Field Guide to Web Applications. It’s a new resource that is designed to help web developers create great web apps. We’ve heard loud and clear from users that they want more and better web apps, and we hope this new field guide will enable you to create those web apps. Our fictitious author Bert Appward guides you through topics like the properties of web applications, design fundamentals, tips for creating great experiences, and a few case studies that put best practices to use. Whether you're building your first web app or are just looking for ways to improve your existing apps, I hope you'll find the field guide useful.

We built the field guide to embody the principles and best practices that it preaches. We stepped away from the normal webpage look, and instead designed the experience around a field guide. We used many CSS3 features like box-shadow, opacity, multiple backgrounds and more to provide a rich, visual experience. To make sure that it worked offline, we used AppCache and other than some URL rewriting techniques, didn't use any server-side code. We used the HTML5 History API to maintain page state even though everything is served from a single HTML page. We've started working on a new case study about the field guide, so check back soon for that!

Pete LePage is a Developer Advocate on the Google Chrome team and works with developers to create great web applications for the Chrome Web Store. He recently helped launch the +Chrome Developers page on Google+.